hoolidays


Christmas saw us staying close to home this year. While I did miss our family in PA I did not miss the drive down and back one bit. The whole MA family gathered in Plymouth for gifts and dinner on Saturday (gumbo for dinner again with freshly homemade andouille) and then breakfast and stockings on Sunday morning. This left Sunday afternoon and Christmas day to us.

For our first Christmas dinner to ourselves we had decided on a simple roast chicken with Mom H's double cheese potatoes. Not wanting to buy Monday's dinner poultry on Friday I put off the shopping until Sunday. However, due to the Pats' game and a general feeling of comfort at Oma and Opa's house, we didn't get to the grocery on Sunday until 6:05pm which found us standing outside a locked set of doors as the store had closed at 6. Some people were making the dash through the 'Out' doors as they opened to release the shoppers from inside but I didn't want to be one of those people. We quickly made the rounds to the other 2 grocery stores only to find that they too closed at 6pm today and that all 3 stores were not opening on Christmas day at all. So instead of moping for very long we decided to put my new pizza peel to immediate use. Although I was quite sick on Monday you can clearly see that I was up for the job.



While the toppings were entirely pedestrian by some standards (sausage instead of salumi and mozzarella instead of mutz), it really hit the spot and I was glad to see that I haven't completely forgotten how to make a passable pizza dough. And the new peel worked great. Much nicer than using our wooden cutting board as I've done for the past 6 or 7 years.